I hadn’t read it in awhile, but one thing I do recall that I found rather interesting is that Mao’s acknowledgement of an ambiguity in Stalin’s proposals, and personally I see it as an ambiguity in Marxism generally which still hasn’t been fully fleshed out, and personally I think it is underdiscussed.

Socialism’s material foundations is the socialization of labor, which upon it socialism is built through the socialization of appropriation. You cannot socialization appropriation unless labor is socialized, but the socialization of labor is something that arises naturally as a result of the development of the forces of production.

It is clear from many Marxists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hilferding, Bukharin, etc, that this suggests the immediate abolition of all commodity production is not possible, because small producers cannot be “abolished” as small production (of which commodity production is inevitable) is a result of underdeveloped productive forces, and so you can only encourage the small producers to develop instead.

This is ultimately why socialist countries have always allowed for some level of commodity production. To demand the immediate abolition of all small producers is anti-Marxist and idealist. Even in the Manifesto Marx and Engels do not call for this but only an extension of industries owned by the state, alongside with an encouragement of the development of the forces of production, as this would encourage small producers to develop into large producers (or go bankrupt).

The ambiguity is that, in the transition from small producer to large producer, i.e. from private labor to socialized labor, at some point the socialist state will have to absorb that large producer into the public sector. To my knowledge, Marx or Engels did not write much on how this would actually work. This was also, from what I recall, was one of Mao’s criticisms of Stalin. He did not nationalize part of the agricultural sector (the kolkhoz) viewing it as too underdeveloped, and so that sector of the economy still engaged in commodity production, but never presented a plan on how the kolkhoz sector would eventually be incorporated into the public sector as it developed.

Indeed, it is a bit ambiguous as to how developed a sector of the economy, or even a single enterprise, needs to be prior to it being nationalized, so Mao found it problematic that there wasn’t much of an answer to this question. Stalin’s work almost seems to suggest that the kolkhoz sector would develop and become part of the public sector automatically, but Mao argued that clearly at some point there needs to be a political decision made, and so it cannot just be automatic. I think he’s right, the socialization of labor is in some sense “automatic” as it occurs naturally, even in capitalist societies, as industry develops. But the socialization of appropriation is not, that is an active political decision.

I recall Mao complaining about this in a couple areas as well, not just that work.

It reminds me of Che Guevara’s book on political economy where he also has some loosely related comments. He argued that all forms of production inevitably promote a particular superstructure, and so the public sector and collective kolkhoz sector, since they operated differently, must promote competing and contradictory superstructures. He warned that if the Soviets did not take this seriously, if they did not have some sort of active political plan to combat this, then the kolkhoz will promote a superstructure that is detrimental to the socialist state, because they will benefit from encouraging the weakening of the socialist state by reducing public control and selling off assets to the collective farms.

Interestingly, Che used Khruschev’s closing down of the machine tractor stations and selling off of state-owned means of production to the kolkhoz as evidence that this was occurring. Meanwhile, I got the impression from Mao’s works that he viewed Khrushchev’s actions here positively. He believed that not allowing the collective farms to own their own means of production was only serving to sow distrust among the peasantry which would only make it more difficult to later integrate them into the public sector later down the line.